Mark’s Remarks:

I’ve had a lot of fun the past month prepping my trib for the 200th Issue of the  Amateur Press Association (APA) called Alpha-Omega. It’s hard to believe it’s been over 30 years since Freazie and I were bi-monthly contributors to A-O. As I wrote previously I started as a writer for A-O more so than an artist. I would type up chapters of my work and include a few illustrations to go along with it. Freazie joined up and read a couple of chapters of my story Living on the Razor’s Edge. Freazie asked if he could adapt my story to comics form. I said sure and even offered to ink it. I  thought as a team we could probably pull it off and we did for several issues.

Razors Edge came before the Legacy Comics Universe.  It was meant to be a more realistic take on the old super powered human concept we fondly refer to as the Super Hero. My main inspiration for the series was the Fantastic Four and The X-Men. I wanted to catch the family and action elements of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s FF and the teenage aspects of their X-Men. In the ’80’s Chris Clairmont and John Byrne was doing that with new variations of both of these titles, so I had that too for inspiration. I wanted to make it a step farther by borrowing from Lee’s idea for heroes WITHOUT spandex costumes but rather outfitted in regular street clothes like he and Jack did in FF #1-3  It was a concept I had worked on for several years before joining A-O. I first thought of it as a comic book,  then as a comic strip and finally decided to write it out in prose form and publish it in A-O. Freazie would read my typed chapters and then condense them down to comic book pages. He would pencil the pages and letter in his dialogue, then when I go the penciled pages I would ink all of it including Freazie’s lettering. Neither of us were very good letterers. We later talked Billy Leavell into taking over in that department for us on our subsequent Small Press and Independent Comics projects. Billy was a top notch letterer, penciler, inker and scripter. He was very fast too.

Time marched on and for reasons I don’t recall right now, we decided on different characters for our first small press comic books and then the independent comics later. Freazie had characters he had created years before we worked together which evolved into the Humants. I had character I originally called Para-man which became NewMan. As the NewMan and the Humants universe grew together we brought Razor’s Edge into it as well. Their were sub-plots involving Senator Razor and the other characters but they never got fully introduced into either the Project: NewMan or the Humants titles. Who knows? After Humants #6 finally get’s put together later this year, maybe someday Razor’s Edge will return.

🙂

Onward! Mark

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Archives Spotlight

Archive’s Spotlight is designed to look at all which has come before and add new comments as well. This posting we are reviewing Project New Man 3 Page 22-23!

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Project: New Man #3 – Page 22-23– Here we go again with yet two more pages of revised art. We continue to add simulated  Duo-Shade tones to the  black and white pages from Project: NewMan #3.

Pages 22 and 23 are showcased for this week. As you may recall,  there was no background halftones originally on these pages by Chris Torres and Mark Poe which make up Chapter 7 of The Haunted Man storyline. This art was originally done on Bristol Board which has always been the chosen working surface for most comic book pencilers. Thanks to Photoshop we can simulate the shading which use to be done on the Duo-Shade illustration boards.

Click the before and after images here, to see larger views and compare the art.

When we dug out all this material several years ago to start this web site we just scanned and cleaned up the original inked pages and presented them as is. Chapter 7 had never had any halftones like we did on the previous chapters.

Back in the day we had two ways of adding halftones to the original art. We could use the Duo-Shade boards like we used in Chapters 1-6 or we could use full sheets of adhesive Zip-atone. Zip-atone and  Letratone were two of the products available which did the same thing.  This graphic design material consisted of thin plastic film with a slight adhesive over a backing sheet which was used to place a halftone dot screen across an area of a black and white illustration. The dot pattern came in a variety of gray-tone percentages and in different sizes of dots, measured as lines per inch. Some were straight percentage tones or lines. Some would be gradients and some special op-art. Some were pretty cool looking!

The way you used Zip-atone was to place it over your drawing, on a light table preferably, cut out the shape with an Exacto knife, carefully lift it, and place it over the drawing, then smooth it out. Another brand offered halftones which could be rubbed off onto the selected area. These, however were often messy and usually stuck to areas you didn’t want tones on.

Check back next week for more pages in PNM #3 as we continue updating these books for printing with Ka-Blam Comic Book Printing and digital sales at IndyPlanet as well as DriveThru Comics.

Remember, we have digital editions at IndyPlanet and DriveThru Comics RIGHT NOW! You can still download Project: NewMan #1 and Humants # 1 for absolutely FREE! Project: NewMan # 2 and Humants # 2 can be downloaded now, for immediate gratification, for a mere 99ç each! And if you want actual hard copy prints the Indyplanet will sale those to you for only $2.99 each! And we also have Mega Tales #1 featuring the debut of the other long ago project Mark and Greg Legat did called Tess, The Living Tesseract.

What are you waiting for? Go grab some Mega Comics Group / Legacy Comics  right now! Check out the cover link to the left here which will take you to Indy Planet. Here’s the link if you had rather got to DriveThru Comics.

CU Next Week!

Fair Use reference to intellectual property of other companies are intended for historical and informational accuracy only. Mega Comics Group™ or Mega Graphics, LLC™ does not represent or have any relationship to any other company or entity or their intellectual property unless otherwise clearly noted. Mega Tales™ and © 2010 Mega Graphics LLC, unless otherwise noted herein.  Project: New Man™ and  Humants™ and © 2010 Freazie White, Jr. D.B.A. Legacy Comics. Tess, the Living Tesseract™ and © Stephen Greg Legat and Mark Poe. All rights reserved. Mega Graphics LLC, licensor.